About Choosing Databases

Sometimes it can be hard to choose the right database for your research project. Do you need a general database or a subject-specific tool? Are you looking for journal articles, newspaper articles, ebooks, images, or something else? This page will help you decide which research project is most likely to be helpful for your research needs.

These suggested lists are not comprehensive; not all available library resources are listed. For specific research help, use the Contact Us box or email librarian@wvwc.edu.

Reference Resources

Reference sources, including reference databases and full-text electronic reference books, help students to better understand a topic to improve understanding before other research sources are explored. It is difficult, if not impossible, to produce a quality research assignment on a topic that is not well understood. By using reference sources, students can develop better research questions, construct more effective searches, and more effectively produce quality coursework.

Everything you expect from the Encyclopaedia Britannica plus hundreds more articles. Also includes Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus, current full-text magazine and journal articles, life news feeds from The New York Times, maps, photos, illustrations, videos, and multimedia clips. Recommended websites are featured as well as notable quotations and a Gateway to the Classics.

Explores more than 800 hot topics in business, politics, government, education, and popular culture. Especially helpful feature is the Pro/Con section for background information on all sides of an argument.

Credo Reference is an online platform provides easy access to high-quality, citable reference content to help students begin exploring new topics and ideas. Credo Reference also provides topic pages which build on other library resources to help student research more effectively.

A database of high quality encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.

Streaming Media

The library subscribes to streaming media products to provide our students with access to media materials in an convenient and easy to use medium. Streaming audio and video may be used on or off campus by members of the campus community.

Invaluable resource for music professionals and collectors. A wide range of standard and specialist repertoire are included. Contains more than 130,000 CDs and 2,000,000 tracks of music. Includes comprehensive liner notes, opera synopses and libretti, composer and artist biographies and other essential information for music scholarship.

Contains the world's greatest literature - many classic novels, plays and poetry, from medieval times to the twenty-first century under various categories, such as Children’s Classics, Classic Fiction, Shakespeare’s Plays. New titles are added every month.

General Article Databases

General article indexes are broad research tools, encompassing multiple types of resources and multiple areas and disciplines of study. General databases may include general readership periodicals, scholarly journals, and/or news sources in their collections. Because of their wide scope, general databases are often the preferred starting point for student research queries.

Academic Search Complete offers an enormous collection of the most valuable full-text journals, providing users access to critical information from many sources unique to this database. In addition, this database is the leading source of peer-reviewed, full-text for STM research, as well as for the Social Sciences and Humanities. This scholarly collection offers unmatched coverage of information spanning a broad range of important areas of academic study, including anthropology, engineering, law, sciences and more.

A multidisciplinary, full-text database that brings together relevant content from mainstream periodicals, "gray" literature, and the alternative press -- with a focus on the critical issues and events that influence women's lives in more than 190 countries. Contemporary Women's Issues includes English-language titles from East and West Africa, Asia, and South and Central America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe.

Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now more than 5,000 journals in the directory. Currently more than 2,000 journals are searchable at article level. The number of articles included is more than 43,000.

Multidisciplinary database which provides full text for nearly 1,700 general reference publications with full text information dating as far back as 1975. Covering virtually every subject area of general interest, this database contains full text for nearly 500 reference books and over 164,000 primary source documents, as well as an Image Collection of over 502,000 photos, maps and flags. Updated daily.

eBooks

eBooks are full-text books which are delivered to the patron via web interface rather than sitting on the shelf. Currently, the library collections include around 500,000 eBooks from a variety of publishers. Some eBooks may be downloaded for offline reading via computer or mobile devices; others must be read through the database portal.

Full-text academic books on a wide range of topics. eBooks can also be found using the Discovery Search or in the library catalog.

Subject-Specific Databases

Like general research databases, subject-specific databases encompass a broad array of different types of information sources. Unlike a general database, though, the information in a subject database is focused on a particular discipline. Subject databases are helpful for finding information on topics within a field.

The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society provides the worldwide scientific community with a comprehensive collection of the most cited peer-reviewed journals in the chemical and related sciences.

The Natural Science Collection includes the Agri & Env, Bio Science, and Earth, Atmospheric & Aqua Databases and provides full-text titles from around the world including scholarly journals, trade and industry journals, magazines, technical reports, conference proceedings, government publications and more. For researchers who need to conduct comprehensive literature reviews, this database includes specialized, editorial-controlled A&I resources for discovery of relevant scholarly research and technical literature critical to the discipline.

An indexed and fully-searchable collection of abstracts that link to the full text articles available from the BioOne organization. Provides a unique aggregation of over 160 high-impact bioscience research journals from more than 123 publishers.

CINAHL Complete is the world’s most comprehensive source of full-text for nursing & allied health journals, providing full text for more than 1,300 journals indexed in CINAHL. This authoritative file contains full text for many of the most used journals in the CINAHL index, with no embargo. CINAHL Complete is the definitive research tool for all areas of nursing & allied health literature and supports nursing and allied health professionals, students, educators and researchers.

Communication Source features full text for more than 840 titles, including over 600 active full-text journals and 150 full-text journals not found in other EBSCO academic databases. This comprehensive resource offers worldwide full-text content pertaining to communication, linguistics, rhetoric and discourse, speech-language pathology, marketing, media studies and related fields.

Designed for educators, administrators, and those seeking professional development resources, this bibliographic and full-text database covers scholarly research relating to all areas of education. Education Research Complete covers the areas of curriculum instruction, administration, policy, funding and related social issues. Topics covered include all levels of education from early childhood to higher education and all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education and testing.

ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the world's most widely used index to educational-related literature. Established in 1966, ERIC is supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement. ERIC is the largest education database in the world—containing over one million records of journal articles, research reports, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, and books.

Provides nearly 550 scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Also features the AHFS Consumer Medication Information (AHFS), which is published by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, and which offers generic drug patient education sheets.

Access provided by the West Virginia Library Commission through WVInfoDepot

SA Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. The database covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Complete coverage is given to various fields of linguistics including descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.

Coverage includes literature from all over the world. Detailed bibliography of journal articles, books and dissertations are provided back to the 1920s and the database contains over 2.2 million citations from more than 4,400 journals & series and 1,000 book publishers. Some links to full text are included.

PsycINFO provides unmatched coverage of behavioral science and mental health fields, containing over 3.3 million citations and summaries dating as far back as the 1600s, with one of the highest DOI matching rates in the publishing industry. Journal coverage, which spans from 1800s to present, includes international material selected from around 2,500 periodicals in dozens of languages.

Only SciFinder® provides researchers with unlimited access to the world’s largest and most reliable collection of chemistry and related science information.
SciFinder offers a one-stop shop experience with flexible search and discover options based on user input and workflow. You can search for substances, reactions, and patent and journal references anytime, anywhere.

The world's most comprehensive source of full text for sports and sports medicine journals, providing full text for more than 520 journals. This authoritative file contains the full text for many of the most used journals from 1985 to current - with no embargo.

Scholarly Sources

Scholarly journals, also known as peer-reviewed or academic journals, represent the foundation of academic discourse and scholarship. Written by experts in a field for experts in a field, articles in scholarly journals are subject to a vigorous pre-publication process known as peer-review to help ensure that the articles presented are of high quality. Scholarly journals are often the preferred sources for academic work.

Newspapers

News sources capture current happenings and events at the local, domestic, and international levels. News sources are updated frequently, sometimes even multiple times per day. While news articles tend to be brief, news articles are an excellent source for research on contemporary issues, current controversies, and evolving issues. Newspapers also provide valuable historical insight on key events and individuals active on local, national, and international stages. The moon landing, the Cuban Missile Crisis, 9/11, and more can all be explored through historical newspaper articles.

Access West Virginia provides direct access to 25+ of Newsbank's WV titles under one searchable link. Used for industry and economic info, company information, legislation, common core education standards, local history research and much more.

This comprehensive news collection is ideal for exploring issues and events at the local, regional, national and international level. Its diverse source types include print and online-only newspapers, blogs, newswires, journals, broadcast transcripts and videos. Use it to explore a specific event or to compare a wide variety of viewpoints on topics such as politics, business, health, sports, cultural activities and people. Content is easily searched and sorted through an intuitive, map-based interface.

News, legal information, business and company profiles, biographies, and consumer information. Across the globe, LexisNexis provides customers with access to billions of searchable documents and records from more than 45,000 legal, news and business sources in the following areas: legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting, and academic markets.

Newspaper Source™ provides cover-to-cover full text for more than 40 national (U.S.) and international newspapers, including Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Times (London), Toronto Star, etc. The database also contains selective full text for more than 370 regional (U.S.) newspapers. In addition, full-text television & radio news transcripts are provided from CBS News, CNN, CNN International, FOX News, NPR, etc.

Access provided by the West Virginia Library Commission through WVInfoDepot

Primary Source Archives

Primary source archives provide access to digitized content from primary sources, primarily in American history but other sources as well.

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity.

Information in the database exists as reproductions of color or black and white photographs, reformatted typed pages, published books, unpublished manuscripts, personal diaries and correspondence, journal and newspaper articles, musical recordings, oral history recordings and transcripts, and other related reproductions.

Contains nearly 1,500 authors and over 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters. Particular care has been taken to index the material so that it can be used in new ways. For example, you can identify all encounters between the French and the Huron between 1650 and 1700.

The definitive resource for researching every aspect of 17th and 18th century America. Contains virtually every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America over a 160-year period. Includes more than 36,000 printed works and 2.3 million pages. Now offering new imprints not available in microform editions.

This collection consists of the diaries, journals, and narratives of explorers, emigrants, military men, Native Americans, and travelers. In addition, there are accounts on the development of farming and mining communities, family histories, and folklore. These accounts provide a view of the of the vast region between Lexington, Kentucky and Winchester, Virginia, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Birmingham, Alabama, and provides information on the social, political, economic, scientific, religious and agricultural characteristics of the region.

The collection includes some 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950. Drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous.

Statistics

Statistical data is useful for students and faculty in many disciplines. Statistics sources can be useful for finding data, analysis, infographics, and more.

Statista.com is one of the first statistic portals in the world to integrate data on over 80.000 topics from over 18.000 sources onto a single professional platform. Categorized into 21 market sectors, Statista.com provides companies, business customers, research institutions, and the academic community with direct access to quantitative data on media, business, finance, politics, and a wide variety of other areas of interest or markets